Ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that family is saying that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open..

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in England and spent most of her adult life in Mexico City, where she participated in the Surrealist movement as an artist, painter, and novelist. NYRB Classics published her memoir Down Below and a collection of her illustrated stories for children, The Milk of Dreams, in 2017.
Olga Tokarczuk is the author of nine novels and three short-story collections. Her novel Flights won the 2018 International Booker Prize, and she is the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature.